The Relic (13 page)

‘I have a great respect for female intuition,' he said. ‘But I never suspected you relied on it. My contact is in Berlin at the moment,' he added. ‘It wouldn't be wise to communicate with him in the usual way while he's there.'

Irina looked at him. ‘You can fly there yourself. If you don't, I'll make contact.' She turned and walked away.

Müller sat down again and ordered another Kïr. He had time to spare before his appointments. She meant what she said. If he didn't go to Berlin, she'd pre-empt him. She believed in Adolph's fairy story. But then she would, he thought, sipping the delicate drink. Superstition was embedded in the Russian psyche. Not even the dehumanizing process of Soviet medical training could eradicate the myths and legends of a thousand years of Russian Christianity. A brand of religion peculiar to the country and its people, where saints and miracles were part of everyday life and idiots were revered as the children of God.

Part of Irina Volkova would believe in a cross that might cause people to rise up and start a counter-revolution. Being Russian she knew it was possible … After seventy years of atheism, religion was re-emerging in the Soviet Union. When official attitudes relaxed, the Easter services had been packed with worshippers. And not just the babushkas, mumbling their prayers, but with young men and women. Perhaps Irina was right to be alarmed.

He finished the glass of Kïr and decided that he had better see his controller in person. He travelled all over Europe on buying trips. He wouldn't be suspected. He paid and left for his first call at a dealer's house in the Place du Bourg-de-Four. He planned to catch the 6 pm flight back to Munich. And then go on to Berlin the next day.

Irina had cooked dinner; she noticed that Volkov refused wine.

‘What's the matter?' she asked him. ‘Aren't you feeling well?'

He said, ‘I've decided to give up drink.'

On an impulse she reached over and touched his hand. ‘I'm so glad, darling. I'll help you. It won't be easy.'

He pulled his hand away. ‘No, thank you,' he said. ‘I'm never taking medicine from you again. I'll manage.'

She said, ‘Why? After all this time, when I begged and begged you to cut down, why suddenly say you're going to stop?'

‘I'm taking your advice,' he answered. ‘I'm pulling myself together. That's what you keep telling me to do, isn't it?'

‘Yes, yes, of course. But why do you have to be so hostile?'

‘How's your patient?'

She saw the contempt in his eyes. She bit her lip; he knew the mannerism well. It signified that he had hurt her.

‘He's recovering,' she said. ‘I don't want to talk about it. There's a play on television. I want to watch it.'

They didn't sit together. He avoided contact with her even more these days, she noticed. She tried to concentrate on the screen, but she kept looking at him. Watching him. He made her uneasy.

‘What have you got there?' she asked. He was eating something out of a box.

‘Chocolate,' Volkov answered.

‘You would need sweet things,' Irina said. ‘It'll help if you feel a craving.'

He stared at the screen. She knew he hadn't been paying any attention to the play.

‘I don't feel a craving,' he said. ‘And I don't want advice from you. I thought you wanted to watch this nonsense?'

She got up. She switched the set off. ‘I'm going to bed,' she said. ‘I've been miserable with you for five years, Dimitri. I don't know why I don't throw you out on to the street!'

‘Because you love me,' he said coolly. ‘You said so not long ago. “I love you, Dimitri. I betrayed your trust and I betray sick, helpless people who come to me for help, because I love you.”'

‘Don't count on it,' she said slowly. ‘I'm only human. There's a limit to what I can endure.'

‘Unlike your patients.'

He didn't turn round when he heard the door bang. He switched the set back on, changing the channel to a news programme. It was so long since he had taken an interest in anything. Years of self-induced coma. An abdication from life and from reality. Sexless, motiveless, enmeshed in guilt for the crimes of someone else. He knew she would cry when she was alone. He had seen her weep when he turned away, chilled into impotence at her touch. He had made her suffer and further imprisoned himself by doing so.

Courage was what he needed. The courage to leave her and beg public forgiveness for his desertion of his cause and his friends. Love, his terrible wife called her obsession with him. But love was what he felt for the stranger who'd thrust herself upon him. Not just the love for her body, for the softness and the scent of her, but for the person inside that body. The spirit that believed in him and would dare anything in its innocence. She had made him come alive in heart and mind.

He sat forward and concentrated on the interview being screened.

A first-floor office had been made available to Müller's controller in the new Soviet Embassy in Berlin. From the windows he had a clear view of the Brandenburg Gate. So much had changed in the city. The wall was long gone, the divided city was united like the country. Germany was one.

Viktor Rakovsky had made a sketch of the scene; he would finish it later. His speciality was water colours. He had exhibited in Moscow under a pseudonym and been pleased with the critical reaction. The painting of St Basil's Cathedral was highly praised. He preferred not to think that everyone knew the artist had painted his best-known work from the window overlooking Dzerjhinsky Square.

He had chosen his stepfather Lepkin's old office when he made his permanent headquarters in Moscow. He had a photograph of him enlarged and framed in silver gilt on his desk. There was another photograph, the same size and framed identically. It showed the famous partisan leader, Ivan Zakob, wearing the medals bestowed on him by Stalin. The two men that Viktor loved. There was no picture of his mother or his murdered brother Stefan. His childish drawings of them were in his bedroom, the only visible momento of their lives.

Rakovsky was thinking of them as he sat there in the borrowed office in Berlin. It was late afternoon and the sky was turning red outside. He remembered the vivid sunsets of his boyhood and the way the sun would hang like a crimson ball above the edge of the trees surrounding their house and then plunge out of sight as if it had been dropped in a moment of carelessness. He had been frightened until Ivan explained to him that the sun went to bed like everyone else and would be up and shining for them in the morning. Ivan was a fanciful fellow, and he loved to tell the boys stories. Who would have thought he could turn into a hero—leading his partisans against the Germans.

Ivan had become a legend, a symbol of all the other Ivans who died on the battlefields and fought village by village and street by street to drive the invader out of Russia. He had stood for them all, when he was made a hero of the Soviet Union by Stalin himself.

Ivan was old and dying, but he lived in Rakovsky's handsome
dacha
and his days were comfortable. Rakovsky called him Little Father and Ivan called him son.

There was a report on the desk in front of Rakovsky. His agent, Peter Müller, had prepared it and left it in one of the embassy ‘letter boxes' for collection. It was in the sleeve of a classical album which Rakovsky's junior secretary had picked up from one of Berlin's best-known music shop on the Tiergarten.

The words leapt at Rakovsky off the page. The words of a man confessing under duress, from drugs and a long festering guilt. Rakovsky could see it all. The house in the woods. His mother screaming as she was raped; his brother bursting from their hiding place to run in and try to save her. Sweat broke out over his body. He couldn't go on reading. He had a bottle of Scotch whisky in his office; he poured a half tumblerfull and drank it down. Now he saw the missing details in his nightmare. His brother lying on the floor with his skull crushed. His mother stretched mute and bleeding on the bed. The sound of shots as her ravager murdered her. And then the moment when the cupboard door opened and he looked up in terror at the German soldier staring down at him. He was still stifling his baby sister's cries. Then the door closed.

He heard the roar of the motorcycle being started up and then fading until it was silent. A long silence afterwards. He hadn't dared to move. He was trembling with shock. He was in the dark. At last he let the baby cry. He was afraid she might suffocate. He didn't open the cupboard door till he heard Ivan's voice calling when he came in. Then Ivan's terrible cry of anguish from the bedroom.

Ivan had gathered Viktor and the baby Valeria in his arms; tears were streaming down his face.

He heard his own voice saying over and over, ‘Germans. Germans did it.' Ivan had held him back from the bedroom by force. They had dug the grave together. He remembered how deep it was and how hard it was to break the earth. He hadn't seen their bodies. Ivan had wrapped them together in the curtains his mother had made for the sitting room, and laid them in the bottom of the grave. Even so, Viktor had seen the red stain spreading amongst the bright colours of the makeshift shroud.

They didn't get the train to Moscow. The terminal at Kharkov had been bombed. There were no trains and the roads were under constant air attack.

The days afterwards were blurred in his memory. He was in shock. He screamed if Ivan left him alone, even for a few minutes. They journeyed into the countryside, sleeping under the trees, eating what Ivan could trap or shoot. When the partisans found them, they gave Valeria to one of the women to look after, but he stayed with Ivan. The camp in the forest was their home. It moved as the Germans advanced. They lived like nomads, ambushing, killing the enemy, moving on.

Some of them were captured. Viktor had seen their bodies swinging from a gallows in a little hamlet after the Red Army had retaken it. He had been given a rifle and Ivan taught him how to shoot. He'd said, ‘You're a man now. You're old enough to kill Germans.'

They never took prisoners. They lined them up and shot them. The first time Viktor saw an execution, he vomited. Then he remembered his mother and Stefan and made himself go back and look up at the bodies till he didn't mind any more. Ivan had understood. Ivan was beside him when he shot his first German. He was ten years old.

‘Now you'll sleep better, he had told him. ‘Your mother is smiling on you from heaven.'

Viktor drank more whisky. He had lived through the war with the partisans. He had learned to accept death. His little sister had sickened and died before her second birthday. There were no drugs in the camp. A lot of the children died. He had seen horrors committed by the enemy, and horrors that were the doing of his comrades-in-arms.

Lepkin had been captured during the Battle for Smolensk. He had been denounced as NKVD by one of his own men and executed.

Viktor was twelve when the war ended and by that time he had forgotten how to cry. Now he sat and stared out at the Brandenburg Gate, lit by the bloody glow of a German sunset and saw it through a mist of tears. After thirty years, he could come face to face with the soldier who had spared his life. And raped and robbed his mother.

Lepkin's gift to her was on display in the German's Munich mansion. Viktor had sketched the green enamel and the twinkling diamonds in the tattered book he'd taken with him from the charnel house that had been his home. Ivan had given it to him, with the wooden doll he'd made for Valeria. They'd buried the doll with her in the forest.

And he'd drawn and coloured the cross that he'd seen on his mother's bed. The cross she spoke of with hatred, as if she feared it. Her ravisher and murderer had stolen it.

Müller had ended his report: ‘If the cross Brückner describes could possibly be the genuine Relic from Kiev Cathedral it could present a serious threat to Soviet stability in the Ukraine.'

Rape and murder, wartime looting—a dark stain on the past of a very important German industrialist. Such incidents were not unique. It was the cross that had prompted Müller's journey to Berlin, and the rarely used ‘urgent' signal he'd sent to the embassy.

And he was right. The threat was incalculable. Rakovsky forced himself to be calm, to consider the wider implications. The great Soviet Empire was only just holding together; if a group of Ukrainian nationalists were to raise St Vladimir's Cross as a rallying point, the most important state within the Union would erupt into rebellion against Moscow.

Müller was not only a very good agent, but an old partner. He had asked for an urgent meeting with Rakovsky to discuss the report and get instructions.

They hadn't seen each other for a long time. Both had been comparatively junior when their association started. Rakovsky was embarking on his career as a diplomatic spy, moving under different names and jobs from one Western embassy to the next. He had personally recruited the antique dealer. Over the years they had worked well and closely together until the political situation in Russia underwent the first dramatic changes. It was time for Rakovsky to leave the field and work in Moscow. Another reason was his beloved Ivan. Terminal cancer was diagnosed. But Rakovsky kept one or two special agents under his control. He wouldn't relinquish Peter Müller to anyone else.

The light was fading; lamps were aglow in the streets and the shop windows were lit invitingly, tempting the late shoppers. There was a reception at the Italian Embassy; he was expected as a special guest. A dinner and the theatre afterwards, arranged by his own ambassador to entertain the trade delegation he was leading.

Trade interested him now, as other intelligence spheres had done in harder days. Industrial espionage was high on the list of Soviet priorities. They were starved of the technical skills of Western manufacturing industries. The best brains and resources had gone into military research and development until Gorbachev came to power.